(No.99) Moving to IPv6: Challenges for Internet Governance

In February 2011 IANA officially announced the exhaustion of its IPv4 addresses pool. This represented that there were no more space IPv4 available for the Regional Internet Registries. Two months later, in April 2011 APNIC announced the implementation of his last /8 policy. This APNIC policy officially started a period of tight management of IPv4 resources allowing only a final limited space allocation to current Asia Pacific operators and guarantee a small IPv4 block for newcomers focusing in allow them to have a smooth transition to IPv6. According to the current consumptions rates is expected that RIPE serving Europe and Middle East region will also implement his last /8 policy in some moment during 2012. The adoption of IPv6 by network operators has been discussed extensively at previous IGFs, but with the imminent exhaustion of the IPv4 address pool, the focus on the Internet governance implications of this issue has intensified. The NRO recognizes that the adoption of IPv6 is the only way to allow Internet to continue to grow, without very major change to its architecture. In order to facilitate the adoption of IPv6 different sector and groups need to coordinate efforts to allow a stable transition to IPv6. This workshop will examine the importance of globally coordinated administration of Internet number resources, possible scenarios for future management of the IPv4 address space, and strategies for progressing the global adoption of IPv6.

Please estimate the overall number of women participants present at the session:

About half of the participants were women

To what extent did the session discuss gender equality and/or women's empowerment?:

It was not seen as related to the session theme and was not raised

Please include any comments or recommendations you have on how to improve the inclusion of issues related to gender equality and:

The session had a full room of attendees with a 40 – 60 female-to-male ratio. Although there were limited interventions from the female audience on the presentations, the show of hand survey the moderator conducted at the end on the level of IPv6 readiness in home and office networks indicated that over 80% of them have IPv6 either at the office or at home or both.

Report

Reported by:

Hisham Ibrahim

A brief substantive summary and the main issues that were raised:

This workshop discussed some of the Internet governance-related issues raised by the adoption and uptake of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), a technology developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to supplement (and eventually replace) IPv4, the version that underpins the Internet today.
The session was moderated by Hisham Ibrahim of AFRINIC.
Geoff Huston, of APNIC, set the scene on the need for IPv6, by taking the workshop participants through a journey through time 20 years back to 1992 and monitored the evolution of several technologies such as the computer industry, main frames, mobile devices and of course the Internet.
Huston made that point that currently 700 million new devices are connected to the Internet per year; translating into the demand for 200 million addresses for IPv4, address space that does not exist.
Huston jumped with his predictions 20 years into the future to 2032 and warned that if we do not deploy IPv6 we will end up with a number of networks that are not able to talk to each other, giving the example of electric voltages and power sockets that work on different voltages and outlets on a country by country basis.
Martin Levy, of Hurricane Electric, showed a single slide that had 5 different real life statistics from the 5 major “geographic / cultural” regions in the world all indicating the same thing. IPv6 is being deployed world wide, the corves are all going up and to the right, with an obvious spike during IPv6 day in 2011, and a clear jump after IPv6 world launch in 2012.
Demi Getko, of NIC.br, gave an overview of what his happening in Latin America, and more specifically in Brazil.
Getko echoed the previous speakers concern on splitting the Internet into people that do not want to move to IPv4 and continue to NAT everything and limit the amount of ports available for different serveries and the ones that move on to IPv6 and leave the first camp behind.
Getko ended his talking saying that while it is easy to get IPv6 deployed at the core level, there still are some obvious last mile and equipment issues that need to be addressed to get a full IPv6 service to house holds and end sites.
There were two other speakers on the panel that were supposed to intervene with their experiences Salam Yamout, of Lebanon and Salanieta Tamanikaiwaimaro from Fiji, however due to last minute apologies they were not on the panel and could not participate.
At this point the moderator opened the floor for comments.
Marco Hogewoning, of the RIPE NCC, discussed the point made by Getko mentioning that many CPEs now support IPv6 and that a survey has shown that 50+ different models have IPv6 support on them.
A question from the floor from the Swiss systems user group was addressed to the panel on how to get the national regulator to do something to promote the transition. The panelists pointed out some of the issues that the regulator can get involved with however there was somewhat of a disagreement of the level of regulation there should be when it comes to technology related issues.
Paul Vixey gave his experinces with IPv6 and DNS.

Conclusions and further comments:

To conclude the session the moderator asked the floor, several questions on the various networks they use at their homes, offices and daily life, the questions revolved around the level of IPv6 readiness these networks have and the level of awareness within the different communities of the need to move to IPv6, from the room responses it was clear that a lot of effort has happened over the past few years and more will be deployed in the near future.